Building a Platform

Taking Action: Building Your Own Social Media Platform and Messaging

If you are still reading, here are actions you can take now, if you want to move beyond traditional media into social media.

BYOP – build your own social media platform to move the messaging to what you want customers and others to know about you. Coke doesn’t want to be Pepsi or Ford be Tesla, so why do you want your message to be controlled by Fox, CBS Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin, WSJ, or any other media channel. Yes, you can use them to promote your platform but think beyond using them as your primary media channel. Next, build a stronger message. This means to stop using social media to define your message. Yes, Trump uses Twitter, but if he had his own media platform don’t you think people would follow him on that app? You can build your own platform and build your own audience and control your own message. Or, you can continue on the legacy path down the “rabbit hole” and when there is another Facebook privacy breach or hack on another platform, where will you be. The real lesson about how Twitter democratized media is that media is not controlled by a few broadcast networks or newspapers anymore, you can have your own network and build your own audience.

Crowdsource content – the real problem of how companies use Twitter and other social media is they have not changed their thinking about content development. Figure 1 – depicts the real challenge of legacy strategy planning. You can see very high control over most marketing operations. It is time to flip that upside down and realize that your customers are also content developers, viral marketers, digital marketing experts, creative designers and more.

Direct, Not Predict or React – Developing my own business and consulting to others more than forty years I have found you cannot react in time, nor reasonably predict, you can only succeed if you direct your customers to your strategy. By building your own platform, you can also move beyond being a marketspace follower.

Two Ears and One Mouth – with your own platform, you can do what key leaders are saying you can do: more “social listening.” Through the process of being integrating in your own messages you can coopt customers into your content development, so you can be more aligned with changing customer needs and desires.

If you still want help in building your own platform, I and my colleagues are working on just that and can help you build your own platform. Email for more to cross@gocross.com